As Vice President Mike Pence made a fool both of himself and the country he is supposed to be representing at the Olympic Games by refusing to stand for the athletes of any nation other than the US, back at home the Washington Post was reporting on a President Trump who appears to have nothing […]

Of course Donald Trump wants a military parade. I’d be surprised if he didn’t. It’s just what an insecure narcissist would want. A parade would be the national equivalent of his strutting around like a peacock, dying to turn heads. Even a politician can see that: “I think confidence is silent and insecurity is loud,” […]

Even interventionists are regretting some of the wars into which they helped plunge the United States in this century. Among those wars are Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest in our history; Libya, which was left without a stable government; Syria’s civil war, a six-year human rights disaster we helped kick off by arming rebels to […]

History says “yes” In George Orwell’s classic dystopia 1984, the mutability of the past is a lethal weapon in the arsenal of tyranny: if history can be molded into whatever shape is required, all the better to serve the Party and Big Brother. Quite a feat, believable perhaps only as fiction, and yet this […]

The Anglo-American aggressionaddicts haven’t kicked the habit. The team that brought you shock and awe and Operation Infinite Justice is gearing up for yet another crack at winning a senselesswar in the Middle East.’Today’s anti-war campaign must break the parliamentaryconsensus for war which proved so calamitous in 2003.’ (Photograph: MikeKemp/In Pictures/Corbis) This time the […]

Can Ron Paul Be Tamed? No – but his campaign can You know you’ve hit the big time when the Establishment comes knocking on your door with an offer to sell out. It means you’re drawing blood: that your campaign, or whatever, is having an effect — and not one that pleases the Powers […]

“We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night. The precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say, ‘You now are entering Imperium.’ Yet it was a very old road […]

The campaign to lure the US into attacking Iran has one big problem to overcome before the War Party can taste success: the rather obvious fact that such a war would benefit Israel, and not the United States. This is why Israel’s partisans in the US constitute the spearhead of the pro-war agitation, why […]

When she was running for president in 2008, Hillary Rodham Clinton threatened to“obliterate”Iran if it attacked Israel. Her opponent, Barack Obama, responded that Clinton’s threat was “too much like Bush.” Four years later Iran has not attacked Israel (and will not do so, unless attacked by Israel first), but President Obama is actually carrying […]